


Came A Stranger

by lastwingedthing



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Earth, Gen, Post-Canon, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-13
Updated: 2010-04-13
Packaged: 2017-10-08 22:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/80045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastwingedthing/pseuds/lastwingedthing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All of this will happen again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Came A Stranger

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks once again to clavicular for all her help and reassurances!
> 
> Warnings: this fic contains a (brief) graphic description of violence against a child that occurred in the series.

It starts with a girl – yeah, I know you’ve heard this one before.

It starts with a girl. She’ll be born tomorrow or the day after, or the day after that. Her history is close enough for you to touch.

She’s a skinny blonde girl, dirt-poor and smart-mouthed, growing up in a string of midsized marginal towns still dreaming of their better days that happened fifty or sixty or eighty years ago. She lived through the New Citizens and the September Movement and the ninth-day marches; she never finished high school – who gives a fuck about education these days anyway – but she’s cleverer than she looks, than anyone gives her credit for. She was born to a woman who believed suffering was good for the soul, so she suffered… but that’s an old story, and you already know how it will end.

All of this has happened before.

Her mother taught her how to hurt, showed her caring through violence and love through pain; but the girl got older, and got out. She learned engines, the machinery of oil and metal and carefully controlled explosions, but what she loved best was the speed: alone on the back of her bike, watching the world unfold itself around her while she remained separate and outside. She used to dream of flying, when she was a little girl. Used to dream of stars and fire in the black.

Now she has her independence and a list of possessions she can count on her hands: one bike. One gun. Tools, a guitar, the army boots she stole from her mother’s boyfriend – the last one her mother had. She’s one more migrant on the violent, fracturing highways, travelling from town to town in search of work that almost never comes. She’s scarred from fists and knife fights, but she takes care of herself. No one else ever has.

Her name is Kasey. Irony’s cruel and Fate’s a cold bitch with one eye on time-share and God has a sick sense of humour, sick as a tiny blonde child lying on the carpet with blood seeping from her skull. Don’t you remember? But Kasey never does, and maybe that’s a kindness. Maybe that’s the cruellest thing of all.

She blows into town in a vicious September, hot like the sky has forgotten the season. Not everything happens in its proper time. There are no more jobs here than in any other town she’s been, no less poverty or sick grinding despair. This place lies in the border lands, before the true desert begins, flat dry land shrinking down under the widest-ever sky. The low dull-coloured buildings disappear into the landscape, erase themselves under all of that burning blue weight.

There are talents Kasey can admit to in front of anyone she meets. She’s the girl who drives the fastest, fights the hardest, fucks the wildest, drinks any man under the table; the girl that laughs the whole way through. Laughs at violence, and at heartbreak, and at death. That last’s never been the thing she fears.

So she comes to the bar first, before any other place. Even in the afternoon heat there are people there, rough and road-stained, jagged round the edges. Kasey’s people, and she takes her place among them with a grin and a swagger, as if her clothes aren’t stained and her hair isn’t lank and unwashed. Here it’s wealth and cleanliness that are taboo.

She drinks a while, talks. As the crowd grows, more hard men gather round the stranger, and she laughs in the centre of it all and tosses back another shot. She gets out her guitar in the end, just messing around, playing the random snatches of music that sing inside her mind when she’s alone. Just like the tall man in the corner on the old piano, the one behind her that she hasn’t seen. He’s brawny and handsome, a tough man, a good man in a fight; he has that old name, the one he carried for two thousand years a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. It’s been too long to forget. Sometimes he wakes in the hot dusty mornings of this dead-end town and remembers dreaming that he knows the secrets of the universe. If only he sleeps long enough, he thinks, he can carry them into the waking world. Just a little more time.

Kasey’s long-gone father never taught her how to coax music from piano keys; Sammy’s never played guitar on a beach to a woman he loved and lost and lost again. What once was has shifted and blurred and changed its shape; there are a thousand brutal ironies, and nothing is the same as it once had been. In the bright shining cities humanity is building its children in the shape of their long-forgotten dead. The sun who stepped out from his father’s shadow, the Admiral who lived on the edge of a knife, the dying prophet who led her people to the future and the prophet who saw the future in her own deaths. They are the shape of things to come and they too will dream of what once might have been.

And here in the bar the future is building itself. It is building itself from music, from notes plucked from guitar strings and hammered out of piano keys, from a woman and a man who are strangers to each other and have met and fought and loved a thousand times. At first the fragments they’re each playing will sound like chaos, but the music will build from random chords and half-heard snatches, it will come together and rise into the song they’ve dreamed of all their lives. Together they’ll play as if they’ve practised for years, together they’ll play the song that haunts them both, like they never managed in that other life. It’s an old song. You know it well.

When it ends they’ll stare at each other while applause rises around them, mockery turned to genuine admiration. They’ll be afraid. Fear is the human response to what it does not understand and they have always, _always _been nothing more than human. We are the ones that place limits and create definitions and then discard everything that falls outside the lines we draw. We are all powerful, when we choose to be; we are all capable of flying back from the maelstrom with open eyes. The woman Kasey once was and will become again is only the first.

They’ll look at each other like strangers; Kasey will shake her head, and tell him her name. They’ll explain to each other that they must have heard the same arrangement somewhere before, when they were children; they’ll talk about coincidence and random chance. They’ll come up with careful explanations that fit all the facts and they’ll know, they’ll _know_ that the truth is something else. Before they can even admit it to themselves, they’ll know. They’re strangers who’ve been dreaming of each other for a hundred and fifty thousand years.

Can’t you see them there, as they watch each other, wary with fear and desire and knowledge they can’t remember and never quite forgot? They’ll take your breath away, these little grease-stained beauties, with all their scars and all their strength, the strength they don’t yet understand they have. There are cracks in his boots and oil on her jacket, and they’re so painfully human with their dirty human hands. And they’re strong and beautiful, and so fragile: little human lives standing on the edge, with all the weight of their destinies poised to swallow them whole. They have fought before, and bled before, and loved before, and died before, again and again and again. Candles that burn twice as bright live half as long, and they will burn very bright. She will lead the way and he will follow; they will go out like fireworks and they will rise as they burn. They will lead their people towards truth and redemption and the end of the cycle of life and time. They will throw themselves into the heart of the maelstrom, into the sun.

Tonight he will dream of dead seas and one-winged birds. Tonight she will dream of fire and a storm big enough to swallow the sky. Tonight they will dream the shape of things to come.

All of this has happened before.

They have lived and suffered and died and died and died, caught in the cycle, caught in the wheel. They stand balanced on the edge of the void, and the clock is already racing down towards their end. There will be pain enough to break them both. You already know what is coming.

And it will not end. Both of them will live anew, to fight and suffer and rise above that suffering, to love and hate and kill and forgive. God is infinite in his mercy: all of this will happen again. They will throw themselves into the fire to burn over and over and over, lives without end.

They have all the time in the universe to get it right.


End file.
